If the initial shock began to subside from Saturday's shooting in Tucson, the public debate did not. Reaction turned increasingly to anger and finger-pointing, much of it about whether anger and finger-pointing influenced the attacker.

Talk-radio hosts and commentators pushed back hard against charges, notably by Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, that they helped create an atmosphere ripe for such an attack, which claimed the lives of six people and wounded 14 others, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Some hosts said they feared for their free-speech rights.

But media watchers said the defensive tone in many of Monday's discussions underscores how deeply divided the nation has become and misses the point about violent images and language that pervade the political culture, much of it recently associated with health-care and immigration reform.

"In some ways, it's irrelevant whether the broader toxins in the culture are what led the shooter to do what he did," said Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

"Those toxins are out there," he said. "The idea that they can increase their concentration in the national bloodstream and that there will be no price to pay for it ever, that's what's scary and true and independent of this guy's motive."

Internet bloggers began to raise political issues in the earliest hours after Saturday's shooting, posting a now-infamous map prepared by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that used crosshairs to target congressional districts. Giffords' was among them.

Palin and her supporters quickly said there was no attempt to inject violent images into the campaign. And they took down the map from an old campaign website.

The debate took a sharper turn after a Saturday evening news conference, when Dupnik talked about "the vitriol and rhetoric we hear day in and day out from people on radio, on TV." He called Arizona "the mecca of prejudice and hatred."

Dupnik was heavily criticized on the air and the Internet on Sunday, with one Tucson radio host calling for the sheriff's resignation.

Dupnik not only refused to back down, he added lax gun laws to his list of concerns.

By Monday, conservative commentators were furious, insisting that the shooting suspect, 22-year-old Jared Loughner, was a "deranged individual" clearly unassociated with the Republican Party or the "tea party" movement.

"I have so desperately this weekend looked for a leader, looked for someone with common sense, looked for someone who would tell the truth," syndicated radio host Glenn Beck said on his first program since the shootings.

"Instead, I find a sheriff who has no facts and blames it on talk radio. Instead I find, I believe it was Time magazine that said, if I may quote: 'We have none of the facts yet, but who would be surprised if this was a Glenn Beck fan."

So far, investigators have not disclosed everything they found at the suspect's home, but Internet videos and writings suggest no mainstream political affiliation.

Palin crosshairs cited

Media critics said it was difficult to ignore the violent tones of political rhetoric in the recent election cycle, from Palin's crosshairs to a speech by Nevada Republican Sharron Angle, who used the phrase "Second-Amendment remedies" in her unsuccessful campaign to unseat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Angle denied any violent intent in her speech.

In Arizona, Republican Jesse Kelly, who narrowly lost to Giffords in a hard-fought campaign, angered many people last year when he invited supporters to shoot "a fully loaded M16" as part of his effort to unseat Giffords.

On Monday, Kelly replaced his campaign website with a statement: "In the wake of this stunning tragedy, my prayers are with Rep. Giffords, her husband Mark and the rest of her family. May God's strength comfort her as we pray together for her recovery. We mourn for those who lost their lives in this horrible act. Senseless acts of violence such as this have absolutely no place in American politics."

Democrats also have used violent language. In his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, speaking of GOP attacks, said, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

Kaplan, of USC, said the risk of employing violent imagery is that not everyone will recognize the nuances.

"I don't think there is a hard and fast line and on one side of it are smart nice people who know that those metaphors really don't mean what they say and on the other side just a few nutballs who don't know the difference," he said.

Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox was wounded in 1997 after an especially divisive vote to build a new baseball stadium for the Arizona Diamondbacks.

"The man who shot me said he had heard on the radio time and time that I should be taken out," she said Monday. "I still hear that. People think if they take me down, then the issue will go away, but it won't."

Former Rep. Jim Kolbe, a Republican who represented Arizona's 8th Congressional District before he retired and Giffords was elected, acknowledged the incivility that has taken over political discourse in recent years. But he said Dupnik was wrong to blame the Tucson shootings on political speech.

"I would say we should be changing our language, but not specifically because of this incident," Kolbe said on "CNN Monday."

"We should be having leaders on both sides lower the level of the rhetoric, stop making accusatory statements, listen to both sides. The American people want us to find solutions, and we won't do that if we don't listen."